Re: The new testsuite -- thoughts

[Bob Friesenhahn]

On Tue, 4 Jan 2005, Ralf Wildenhues wrote:

> Our new testsuite in HEAD has advantages
>
> - less time spent in bootstrap
> - nice framework
>
> and disadvantages
>
> - running some tests takes more time
> - for some tests the client must have Autoconf and Automake,
>  thus also GNU m4, Perl, gettext plus whatever Perl needs.
>
> This is by far too much I am willing to do for testing on a new system.
> I am not willing to tell a bug reporter even that he has to install more
> than just Autoconf and Automake.  On some systems you have strict quotas

I agree that libtool has tended to require an ever larger set of tools 
on the target in order to run the test suite.  At the current rate, it 
will soon be necessary to install Linux in order to run the tests, and 
the tests will then have limited value. :-)

Ideally the test suite will provide everything it needs so that most 
tests can be run on a fresh OS without embellishments.  The more tools 
we add on the target, the less valid the test results become.

Bob
======================================
Bob Friesenhahn
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http://www.simplesystems.org/users/bfriesen